The United States nuclear weapons enterprise must be flexible, scalable and collaborative in coming years in a world where Russia and China are rapidly modernizing their nuclear triad, officials said during a Tuesday webinar held by the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance (ANWA) Deterrence Center.
Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Eric Wollerman, president and CEO of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, which runs the Kansas City National Security Campus, discussed challenges facing the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Budil, who is also president of Lawrence Livermore National Security, said she likes the term “strategic agility” in response to a comment from ANWA managing director David Cherington, who moderated the discussion.
Budil, who leads a workforce of roughly 9,000 at the national laboratory in California, said the labs, nuclear weapons sites and contractors serving the weapons complex need a “culture of urgency.” She also said that all these parties must recapture the collaboration level of “50 years ago.” That would be around 1976, amidst the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Budil, who praised her lab’s “incredible relationship” with Kansas City, also said the delivery time for projects now taking 15 years should be shrunk to five years or so. Advances including artificial intelligence through the Genesis Mission will play a key role in increased efficiency, Budil and Wollerman agreed.
Kansas City is together with NNSA “restarting a production environment where we need to produce essentially any system any time,” Wollerman said. Kansas City makes non-nuclear components for NNSA, he added.
“Just a couple numbers for you and then we can see we delivered 277,000 components last year,” Wollerman said. These parts went primarily to the Pantex Plant in Texas. Breaking that figure down would start getting into classified areas, he said. “But, that’s a lot of parts.”
A major non-nuclear expansion is underway for NNSA facilities at Kansas, as Wollerman said his crews recently completed Phase 1, which includes building a 700-person building for classified work. The new building will be equipped with information technology, security and furniture by early 2027, he said.
Budil also said NNSA sites are blending old and new technologies to prepare for expanded plutonium pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
From the 1950s through the 1980s the old Rocky Flats plant in Colorado was the government’s chief producer of plutonium pits, which serve as triggers for nuclear weapons. Plutonium pit production “is a known technology, known equipment, Rocky could make lots of pits,” Budil said.
The process of building plutonium pits is a blend of “science, technology and art,” Budil said.
“Our designers are reading build books” because there is “no digital record” and limited images of “how these things are built,” Budil said. Then the book information will be fed through NNSA’s high-performance computing to help develop digital models for pit making, she added.